


Pairo

by Shiakuma



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: And dragging Leorio down with him, Angst, Except it's not actually late night, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Introspection, Just that vibe y'know, Kurapika is going through shit, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Past Kurapika/Pairo, Smoking, Toxic codependecy, Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-26
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-17 08:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29714142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shiakuma/pseuds/Shiakuma
Summary: He knew that when Kurapika’s love inevitably killed him, that he would follow swiftly in his footsteps. He’d become a carbon copy of the man, stuck miserably in the clutches of unrequited devotion for a dead person. Whoever was infected with a horrid infatuation with him was doomed to suffer the same fate as he did with Kurapika and Kurapika with Pairo. It was an eternal cycle of passion and despair, leading only to incurable anguish. Pairo would become a pandemic.
Relationships: Kurapika/Leorio Paladiknight
Comments: 4
Kudos: 16





	Pairo

**Author's Note:**

> Trigger warnings - This one is pretty dark  
> Alcohol and smoking  
> Unhealthy coping mechanisms  
> Self-destructive behaviour  
> Discussions of s*icide and death but no actual death (except Pairo because, y'know,)

Pairo was an enigma; a force impossible to describe. He was the ghost of a first love that would ultimately become a last. A memory of smiles and light and a time when things felt okay. The bodily remains of the beginning of a cruel cycle buried six feet under. Leorio couldn’t even begin to understand how the dead could still hold so much power over the living, but Pairo remained the source of the greater part of his troubles despite being long gone. Leorio had never known Pairo, but Kurapika did.

And Kurapika had loved him.

‘Had loved’ likely wouldn’t be an accurate description of Kurapika’s feelings, as the man still clung to the dead boy the same way he clung to the cigarettes that tainted his lungs and the outrageously expensive wine Leorio could always taste on his lips. He clung to his feelings for Pairo like it was the sole thing keeping him alive, and it probably was. He surely didn’t harbour any lingering romantic attractions, those had faded years ago, but he still couldn’t let go of the boy who was his first love. The boy who made him feel unstoppable when they were thirteen and bright-eyed, recklessly fighting their way through life like nothing could go wrong so long as they were together. Yet things did go wrong, and Pairo was dead, leaving Kurapika as nothing but a nihilistic shell of the boy he once was. Kurapika at nineteen didn’t have romantic feelings for Pairo, but he still loved him nonetheless, and he couldn’t bring himself to love anyone else.

That’s where Leorio was stuck. Leorio fell for stifling suit blazers and ties so tight they could suffocate him (and god it wasn’t the ties but he knew Kurapika was suffocating). He fell for one-sided touches, intimacy that served merely as a distraction from his partner’s unending grief. He fell for an empty husk of a person pretending to feel something to escape from their own mind. It was foolish, probably self-destructive, but Leorio fell hard.

Speaking of self-destruction, Kurapika was a ticking time-bomb and everyone knew it. Waist deep in cigarette butts, liquor bottles, and barely touched meals, Leorio had no idea how the man’s body was still functioning. Leorio had offered to move in with him once when he was hospital-bound with translucent skin and hands never free of tremors, but Kurapika had refused. He always refused. Kurapika preferred to be alone and despised accepting any sort of help lest he feel more pathetic or incompetent than he already did. Leorio tried anyway, offering him quiet reassurances and letting himself be used for loveless affection, but at the end of the day, he was never let past the other man’s defenses. It was painful, but Leorio kept telling himself that he could defuse the bomb, he could save this man from himself and whisk him off his feet to the happy ending they both deserved but were too broken to get. He tried and he tried but after another hospital trip landed Kurapika in a psychiatric ward, he was suddenly the one all alone.

He had time to think. Time to ponder over whether inhaling the second-hand smoke that Kurapika was in essence would really be worth it in the end; whether sacrificing every part of himself for someone who could never love him was something he truly wanted. He knew it, Kurapika was poisoning himself and poisoning Leorio by extension; or rather, Pairo was. Pairo was a contagious disease that latched itself onto Kurapika and rendered him unable to love anyone else. It spread to Leorio, who knew for all the pain it brought him he could not let go of Kurapika. Leorio figured it would spread to whoever fell in love with him too. Love, being an unavoidable and uncontrollable thing, was distasteful and undesirable to those infected. It caged the heart in a toxic cycle of yearning and being yearned for and yet never being able to achieve happiness. He knew someone would yearn for him as he yearned for Kurapika, as Kurapika yearned for Pairo. He knew that when Kurapika’s love inevitably killed him, that he would follow swiftly in his footsteps. He’d become a carbon copy of the man, stuck miserably in the clutches of unrequited devotion for a dead person. Whoever was infected with a horrid infatuation with him was doomed to suffer the same fate as he did with Kurapika and Kurapika with Pairo. It was an eternal cycle of passion and despair, leading only to incurable anguish. Pairo would become a pandemic.

Kurapika was simultaneously the brightest and darkest part of Leorio’s life. The moments they shared together filled him with a high that no drug could match, but they were always followed by lows he’d never thought himself capable of reaching. Pairo was a disease but Kurapika was an addiction. He hurt and he hurt and he hurt but Leorio couldn’t leave. A kiss on the cheek and a coffee date followed by days of not speaking. Promises that they’d be together forever only to find an empty pill bottle next to a shot glass. Kisses that tasted like their impending demise and combined desperation for something they couldn’t possess.

Leorio found him on the roof, but he wasn’t concerned. Kurapika was dying, everyone could see it, but he wouldn’t go out like that. Numb and despondent as he was, he’d always had a flair for the dramatic. He’d go out in a bar fight or a freak accident or because of some reckless decision he decided to make without caring about the consequences. He didn’t want to die, wouldn’t actively seek it, but he had no urge to prevent it either. In his mind, he had nothing to lose. If he died then, that would just be what was fated to happen, and if those pills looked enticing it wasn’t because he was searching for death but rather that he was playing with it. Testing its limits.

Hence when Leorio found him on the roof, sitting dangerously close to the edge with a cigarette in hand and an expression that screamed ‘hungover’, he joined him. He sipped at his black coffee, his third that day, his personal pick of poisons, while Kurapika swung his legs and smoked in silence. 

“If I jumped, would you follow?” Kurapika had eventually broken the silence.

“No,” Leorio answered. “It would be stupid. I’m not suicidal.”

“But you love me, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“So you’d suffer if I was gone.”

“Yeah.”

“But not enough to die?”

“I wouldn’t know. You’re not dead.”

“But if I-”

“No.” Leorio seized the wrist of the man beside him, snatching the cigarette out of his hand and taking a slow drag of his own. “You won’t”

Kurapika chuckled. “That’s an indirect kiss, you know.”

“Mhm.” Leorio smirked, popping open the first few buttons of his dress shirt in order to breathe more comfortably. Kurapika would have found it attractive had he been capable of feeling anything other than longing for someone so far out of reach.

In exchange for the cigarette, he stole Leorio’s coffee, gulping down what was left of the scalding liquid before lazily letting the cup drop from his hand to the ground below. The smash that followed was oddly satisfying, but neither of them reacted. Kurapika sighed and laid his head on Leorio’s shoulder. “Pairo’s gone. I’m suffering.”

“I know.”

“And you’re not Pairo.”

Leorio paused, taking another drag and letting the threat of cancer seep into his lungs before replying. “No, I’m not Pairo.”

They sat in a comfortable silence long after the cigarette had burnt out and the butt had been crushed under someone’s heel. Their hands found each other again, fingers intertwined, touch simultaneously full of love and completely loveless. Kurapika spoke once more.

“I think I love you somewhere.”

“Somewhere?”

“Yeah, somewhere.” 

  
  



End file.
